The Elder Scrolls Online’s PvP developer Brian Wheeler has taken part in a rather massive Q&A, detailing the MMO’s PvP combat, competitive realms, guild ownership, map size and much more.

It all went down on the Elitist Jerks forum. Wheeler was asked about the size of the world map, to which he replied, “Cyrodiil is very very large! On foot it would take you roughly 20-30 minutes to cross it from north to south.”

Elsewhere he added, “Cyrodiil in our timeline will look very familiar to Oblivion, however much more spread out. To the question of Jungles in Cyrodiil and the question of Tiber Septim changing the climate, we have a book in the game for you to find for more details about that hiding in Cyrodiil itself.”

On PvP, Wheeler addressed questions about competitive campaigns and rules within The Elder Scrolls Online. He explained, “During Beta we have been using a 48 hour Campaign ruleset but standard Campaigns will last 3 months. We have the ability to make scoring changes and duration changes depending on player needs and we’ll analyze how scoring goes to determine if we need alternate rulesets with different duration, scoring, but also if we need to add player level restricted Campaigns or not. There really is a great deal of flexibility with the Campaign system, and we will be paying close attention to what players ask for to determine which Campaign rules we add.”

Rules are one thing, but skill will still rule the day. Wheeler continued, “Skill is a tricky thing to measure as when most people talk about skill in Elder Scrolls it’s referring to headshots with a bow, blocking, power attacks or dodging at the right time. In Elder Scrolls Online we have many opportunities for players to show their skill as we also have blocking, roll dodging, and sneaking up on enemy players without getting detected.

“There are opportunities to block power attacks which knock your enemy off balance, opening them up for a power attack of your own! That being said we do have to account for network latency so while it’s not pinpoint, there is some wiggle room for dodging that we’ve found to work quite nice in our Cyrodiil battles.”

Wheeler confirmed that when you do manage to win often at PvP, you can show your progress off to the world. “Every other Alliance War Rank will confer a new rank Symbol to the player target frame to indicate what Rank that player is,” he explained. “The player him or herself will not visually be different or have an extended title attached to their nameplate other than the symbol. There also are some very cool looking light, medium and heavy armor sets available in Cyrodiil that have an appearance that should be very familiar to Elder Scrolls players.”

There’s an awful lot more over on the forum thread. Check it out if you want to drill deep into the game’s PvP format.